Enmos
Valued Senior Member
a little defensive are we?
i didn't mean to tread onto your firmly held beliefs.
Hey, if you can be offensive I can be defensive. Seems like a fair deal to me..
You didn't answer that by the way..
Why does evolution select against atheists?
- Thread starter S.A.M.
- Start date
Hey, if you can be offensive I can be defensive. Seems like a fair deal to me..
You didn't answer that by the way..
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Offensive as opposed to defensive.
I found this post to be rather aggressive, out of nowhere:
If I misinterpreted, you have my apologies.
This:
Enmos said:
okay.
this is a response to a line of questions i was asking you enmos.leo said:
the only "misinterpretation" possible is in regards to what exactly is meant by the word "supernatural".
yes, i believe in the possibility of another explanation for the origins of life for the simple reason there is no fundamental natural force or phenomenon that explains consciousness.
it's completely illogical to arrive at the conclusion that "things become alive".
every experiment that has been designed to prove "life from lifelessness" has failed. as a matter of fact they have consistently proved that life comes from life.
Leo,
I think the collective conscious part is more explainable. I mean would you agree that animals have it ? Does bacteria ? Seems so. We just are not recognizing it.
But I feel that the question of where Life started not so much on our planet but originally in the universe is a valid one. And has not been answered.
An open mind on that one is paramount to any conversation since none of us know.
I can accept your position because I don't have a better answer to where it all started. But we also shouldn't assign a god version to what we have no answer for, just because there is no answer yet.
Doesn't appear you are doing that either. :cheers:
I think the collective conscious part is more explainable. I mean would you agree that animals have it ? Does bacteria ? Seems so. We just are not recognizing it.
But I feel that the question of where Life started not so much on our planet but originally in the universe is a valid one. And has not been answered.
An open mind on that one is paramount to any conversation since none of us know.
I can accept your position because I don't have a better answer to where it all started. But we also shouldn't assign a god version to what we have no answer for, just because there is no answer yet.
Doesn't appear you are doing that either. :cheers:
There is nothing to indicate that consciousness requires a separate force from those already discovered. There is some mystery about it, but not a mystery of physics.
i don't push the god issue simply because i don't buy it.
unfortunately none of them explains consciousness
then maybe you can lay some of this understanding on me.
what part of physics explains a human thought? the understanding of self? the comprehension of time?
F = ma
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Yes, religionists typically claim that their religion (and generally only theirs, not anyone else's) is a tool for advancing us beyond our base nature. There was likely some truth to this in the Mesolithic Era, twelve thousand years ago. When members of two neighboring tribes discovered that they had very similar belief systems (because unbeknownst to them they probably came from the same ancestors who passed it down) it might have made them pause and wonder whether they could make peace. As they developed technologies like animal husbandry, farming and city-building, which put pressure on them to live in ever-larger communities, the ability of the tribes in a region to discover their kinship and make peace would have been a distinct advantage.
The problem is that the advantage religion bestowed on our ancestors stalled right there, on the cusp between the Neolithic Era (the Agricultural Revolution) and the Dawn of Civilization. From that point on it became a liability. As our tribe grew to cover more geographical area, it finally came in contact with a tribe of more distant origin who did not share the same religious system because their ancestors had been separated too long and the mythologies had diverged.
While some philosophical systems that we Westerners call "religions" are able to deal with that--such as the Dao and Confucianism--the religions that have come to dominate the world cannot. Judaism, Christianity and Islam exacerbate tribal differences and at their worst teach their members that the members of the other tribes are inferior, evil, or downright inhuman. Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Sunnis, Shiites, Orthodox and Unorthodox Jews... they all evolved into traditions of looking down on each other to the extent that making war and attempting to kill each other off was an acceptable way to resolve that difference when evangelism failed.
So in prehistoric times religion may have played a part in helping us rise above the other animals, but today it has the opposite effect. It strives to unravel our coalescing global civilization and take us back to the days of warring tribes--basically bringing us back down to the level of the other apes.
Only by our ability to override instinctive behavior, such as religion, with reasoned and learned behavior will we be able to move forward and put our tribal days behind us.
Of course there has. The Big Bang has just about achieved the status of a canonical scientific theory: "true beyond a reasonable doubt." The universe was once a point mass of infinite temperature, and I don't think anyone's going to argue with a straight face that life could have existed in that undifferentiated milieu. Since there was no life then and there is life now, then life must have arisen from non-life, whether we've figured out the details or not.
Of course precisely because we have not yet worked out all the details, that evidence is circumstantial and weak, but it is nonetheless evidence and it is respectable evidence. At this point abiogenesis is the only hypothesis for the origin of life that is based on reason rather than faith or crackpottery, so it has rather a lot going for it.
All other hypotheses violate the Rule of Laplace: Extraordinary assertions must be accompanied by extraordinary evidence or we are not obliged to treat them with respect. The religious hypothesis, in particular, is nothing but sophomoric fallacy: "A god created life." But that god is alive so what is his origin? Duh.
"Consciousness" and "thought" are simply words we coined to help us pursue our curiosity about the universe from our own subjective point of view. They're useful to an extent, because all warm-blooded vertebrates (mammals and birds) have vaguely similar brain wave patterns so whatever we figure out about ourselves probably also applies to them. (For example, they all seem to dream--whatever that is.) But unless you consider psychology more of a science than I do (and geeze I'm the guy who preaches Jungian archetypes and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in my management classes) these words are just as subjective and artsy-fartsy as "love," "honor" and the rest of the lexicon.
As for "time," as I've posted in other threads I think that is also a subjective concept. We experience time flowing at a certain constant rate because if we hadn't evolved that particular sense we would not function very successfully in the universe we live in and some other species of creature would now be sitting here typing this. Like "consciousness" and "thought," our model of "time" happens to be very useful: f=ma and all that good stuff. But we haven't got the universe figured out completely yet, what with that pesky force of gravity that simply won't be hammered down into the Grand Unified Theory, so we may end up tweaking our concept of time the way Einstein tweaked Newton's laws. As I've pointed out, the whole Big Bang thingy becomes much less of an enigma if you graph time on a logarithmic scale so zero suddenly becomes minus infinity. And who's to say it doesn't actually flow that way? We've only been here to measure it for a cosmic eyeblink.
Actually independent atoms have been visible since the mid 80s. I was working at IBM when they broke the first pictures. It was kind of funny because they weren't supposed to be wasting company money on something like that, but it generated a lot of good press and prestige.
Iron on copper.
Carbon Monoxide on Platinum
Xenon on Nickel - the original
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
This one:
Enmos said:
'Supernatural' means 'something that is not natural', which means as much as 'something that does not exist'. It's nonsense.
Apparently there are. Otherwise we wouldn't be conscious.
That we don't know exactly how it works is another thing.
Only if you see life as something supernatural. A living thing is just dead matter interacting, and organized, in a certain (complex) way.
There's nothing magical about it.
Duh..
That is no proof that it didn't happen in a similar way at all.
or something beyond, or outside, of nature.
and what is this force?
why hasn't it been discovered during the past 5,000 years or so?
i noticed you gave no logical explanation for things becoming alive.
nor has anyone else for that matter.
a typical theist response wouldn't you say?
"just because you can't see god is no sign he isn't there".
but thanks anyway enmos because you have proved my point.
you CANNOT accept ANY other explanation for life other than what you believe in, another typical theist response.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Same difference.
All the known forces in nature that affects matter.
Your second question is irrelevant.
It's because we don't know. Making up explanations doesn't help.
Theistic response ?
And I agree with that statement, but it sure as hell doesn't mean it IS there either.
Wrong. I can accept whatever explanation as long as there is compelling evidence for it.
By the way, I have no beliefs about how life arose, except that it must have been from natural causes. And that's because supernatural doesn't exist by definition.
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Enmos
Valued Senior Member
No, it means 'beyond nature'. And there is nothing beyond nature. Nature is all there is. So it's nonsense.
Correct.
Some people will make up a supernatural explanation when they don't understand something, or if something is not understood in general.
I'd love to see someone explain why a certain phenomenon is supernatural
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
That's what the word means, SAM.
Edit: Here -> http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=supernatural